It is in danger of becoming Wiltshire’s HS2.
For more than 20 years, debate has raged over the proposals for a £2.5 billion tunnel near Stonehenge, through the Unesco world heritage site. It has cost the government more than £121 million and not a single spade has hit the ground.
Last week campaigners from the Stonehenge Alliance said they would not stop fighting against the proposed tunnel that would widen a section of road on the A303 at the site, despite losing a High Court challenge on Monday.
The plans for Stonehenge, which involve widening the carriageway from two lanes to four in a two-mile stretch of tunnel that would hide the ancient monument from the view of car drivers, have become the subject of one of the most divisive culture wars in the southwest.
In many ways it is typical of the planning battles being played out across the country. On one side, those wanting to protect the integrity of the ancient site from construction. On the other, those looking for any solution to the increasing traffic to the West Country, particularly the gridlocked A303.
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“This is real ‘David and Goliath’ stuff,” said John Adams, the chairman of Stonehenge Alliance, which has been fighting construction of the tunnel for two decades, a campaign that began when he lived in Chitterne, about seven miles from the site. “The threat is imminent: National Highways have already signed the contracts.”
The alliance is close to reaching its £100,000 crowd-funded goal to raise money for more legal challenges. Adams said the High Court ruling was a setback but the campaigners were not yet out of options.
The budget for the project was £1.7 billion but more recent figures from National Highways show the cost is more like £2.5 billion, including £8 million a year in maintenance for 60 years. This could increase if big archaeological finds are discovered at the site. “We’re looking at another HS2 situation,” said Adams, who now lives in west Wiltshire.
On a soggy Thursday last week, a coachload of German tourists were jostling for position in front of Stonehenge as the rain pelted down. Beyond the lichen-covered monolith sarsens, a snake of traffic on the A303 crawled past.
Thomas Uchtmann, 63, from Emsland in Germany, was part of the tour group and blissfully unaware of the proposed plans for the tunnel. “I think that would change the monument,” he said. “It is quite a spiritual site. I think that a tunnel nearby would not be good.”
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Protecting the UK’s heritage on an international scale is a concern and big players have waded in, including the historian Tom Holland, the artist Jeremy Deller and members of the satirical rock group Spinal Tap.
Last September Unesco criticised the scheme, warning that the construction could mean Stonehenge was stripped of its world heritage site status, just as Liverpool’s Albert Dock was in 2021, becoming only the third site to have done so in almost 50 years.
“It’s cost people sleep, divided families and set people against people,” said Brian Edwards, a historian and researcher at UWE Bristol, who said few of his archaeologist colleagues supported the tunnel.
Among many reasons why the tunnel is contentious is that its entrances, known as portals, will be dug within the site, rather than outside the boundaries. The portal to the east is near Blick Mead, a chalk stream believed to be a sacred spring that predates Stonehenge and where 40,000 artefacts have been recovered. Stonehenge Alliance has unsuccessfully lobbied to increase the length of the tunnel to outside the boundaries of the 6,500-acre site.
English Heritage owns the Stonehenge site and surrounding fields are owned by the National Trust. Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, insisted the tunnel would be “a significant benefit” and the portal entrances were “areas of low archaeological risk”. He said the group “takes Highways England’s reassurance that they have done a lot of work on the effect on the water table”.
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Talking only about the long-term damage to the site overlooks the struggles of people living with the consequences of a big tourist attraction on their doorstep.
If you have travelled to the southwest by car you will have probably been stuck in the traffic jam on the A303. Residents of nearby villages such as Shrewton have had their lives ruined by the daily tailbacks and drivers rat-running through the village to avoid the road.
Janice Hassett, 73, set up the campaign group Stonehenge Traffic Action Group (Stag) 11 years ago to lobby for the tunnel to be built. She lived in Shrewton for 32 years but last month she and her husband David, 76, moved to Scotland after he was knocked off his bicycle in the village by a driver coming home from Glastonbury. “My life was governed by a route that is not fit for purpose,” she said.
Hassett said that the traffic had become worse as more people holidayed in the UK or bought second homes in Cornwall and Devon. “It used to be on the weekend that the road was at a standstill but it’s most of the week now.”
Her seven-minute car journey to Tesco, which she scheduled for Tuesdays as it was a quiet day, often took more than an hour. “Exhaustion has made us move,” she said.
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Many campaigners say they are sympathetic to residents. “There is absolutely a traffic problem; we recognise that,” Adams said. “But there are various single-carriage bottlenecks on that route to Cornwall. By building the tunnel you are just shifting the problem further west. We are not objecting to the tunnel per se, it’s just that it’s too short.”
For the campaigners, the longer they delay the plans, the less likely it is that the tunnel will go ahead. Danny Kruger, the Tory MP for Devizes, was in favour of the plan when the initial funding allocation was made in 2020 but has since adopted a neutral position. He could become the MP for the new East Wiltshire constituency, which would include Stonehenge, as a result of the new boundaries being redrawn.
“My concern now is with the huge fiscal pressures that the government is under,” he said. “I’m not sure this is the best use of the money. Frankly I’d rather it was going into defence, which is a more pressing priority right now.”
Among those that the plans have incensed are people with a spiritual connection to the land. Frank Somers, lead druid of Amesbury in Wiltshire, said that boring through an ancient burial ground went against his beliefs. “There’s a sense of the sacred there,” he said. “Kings and queens of times long forgotten are beneath our feet. It’s awful to think that maybe they won’t be one day, because they’ve been dug up to make way for a dual carriageway.”
Despite the setback in the High Court, Somers said one positive thing was that plans for the tunnel and the resulting legal battles had brought together an unlikely group of people for a common cause.
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“It’s one of the few times in my time as a druid, which is getting on for 30 years, where archaeologists, local businesses, local communities and heritage organisations like Unesco and councils are all in agreement,” Somers said.
Back in the Stonehenge visitor centre, Edwards said the tunnel was not the campaigners’ biggest fear. Rather, as with HS2, it was that the project was started and never completed. “If they hit problems with the chalk stream and water that’s very likely,” he said.
With so many artefacts and discoveries at Stonehenge even in the past decade, his preference was to leave the landscape untouched for future generations with better technology to uncover. “People think they know about Stonehenge, but there’s far more that we don’t know about it than what we do. There’s still so much mystery.”
